Medicago truncatula Root Nodule Proteome Analysis Reveals Differential Plant and Bacteroid Responses to Drought Stress 1 , 2[W][OA (original) (raw)

Medicago truncatula Root Nodule Proteome Analysis Reveals Differential Plant and Bacteroid Responses to Drought Stress

PLANT PHYSIOLOGY, 2007

Drought is one of the environmental factors most affecting crop production. Under drought, symbiotic nitrogen fixation is one of the physiological processes to first show stress responses in nodulated legumes. This inhibition process involves a number of factors whose interactions are not yet understood. This work aims to further understand changes occurring in nodules under drought stress from a proteomic perspective. Drought was imposed on Medicago truncatula ‘Jemalong A17’ plants grown in symbiosis with Sinorhizobium meliloti strain 2011. Changes at the protein level were analyzed using a nongel approach based on liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry. Due to the complexity of nodule tissue, the separation of plant and bacteroid fractions in M. truncatula root nodules was first checked with the aim of minimizing cross contamination between the fractions. Second, the protein plant fraction of M. truncatula nodules was profiled, leading to the identification of 3...

Medicago truncatula and Glycine max: Different Drought Tolerance and Similar Local Response of the Root Nodule Proteome

Journal of Proteome Research, 2015

Legume crops present important agronomical and environmental advantages mainly due to their capacity to reduce atmospheric N 2 to ammonium via symbiotic nitrogen fixation (SNF). This process is very sensitive to abiotic stresses such as drought, but the mechanism underlying this response is not fully understood. The goal of the current work is to compare the drought response of two legumes with high economic impact and research importance, Medicago truncatula and Glycine max, by characterizing their root nodule proteomes. Our results show that, although M. truncatula exhibits lower water potential values under drought conditions compared to G. max, SNF declined analogously in the two legumes. Both of their nodule proteomes are very similar, and comparable down-regulation responses in the diverse protein functional groups were identified (mainly proteins related to the metabolism of carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur). We suggest lipoxygenases and protein turnover as newly recognized players in SNF regulation. Partial drought conditions applied to a split-root system resulted in the local down-regulation of the entire proteome of drought-stressed nodules in both legumes. The high degree of similarity between both legume proteomes suggests that the vast amount of research conducted on M. truncatula could be applied to economically important legume crops, such as soybean.

Protein glycation and drought response of pea (Pisum sativum L.) root nodule proteome: a proteomics approach

Biological Communications

Because of ongoing climate change, drought is becoming the major factor limiting productivity of all plants, including legumes. As these protein-rich crops form symbiotic associations with rhizobial bacteria — root nodules — they readily lose their productivity under drought conditions. Understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms might give access to new strategies to preserve the productivity of legume crops under dehydration. As was shown recently, development of drought response is accompanied by alterations in the patterns of protein glycation and formation of advanced glycation end products (AGEs) that might be a part of unknown regulatory mechanisms. Therefore, here we address the effects of moderate drought on protein dynamics and AGE patterns in pea (Pisum sativum) root nodules. For this, plants inoculated with rhizobial culture were subjected to osmotic stress for one week, harvested, the total protein fraction was isolated from root nodules by phenol extraction, anal...

Identification of new up-regulated genes under drought stress in soybean nodules

Gene, 2008

Legumes/rhizobium biological N 2 fixation (BNF) is dramatically affected under abiotic stress such as drought, salt, cold and heavy metal stresses. Nodule response to drought stress at the molecular level was analysed using soybean (Glycine max) and Bradyrhizobium japonicum as a model, since this symbiotic partnership is extremely sensitive to this stress. To gain insight into molecular mechanisms involved in drought-induced BNF inhibition, we have constructed a SSH (Suppression Subtractive Hybridisation) cDNA library from nodular tissue of plants irrigated at field capacity or plants water deprived for 5 days. Sequence analysis of the first set of 128 non redundant ESTs using protein databases and the BLASTx program indicated that 70% of ESTs could be classified into putative known functions. Using reverse northern hybridization, 56 ESTs were validated as up-regulated genes in response to drought. Interestingly, only a few of them had been previously described as involved in plant response to drought, therefore most of the ESTs could be considered as new markers of drought stress. Here we discuss the potential role of some of these up-regulated genes in response to drought. Our analysis focused on two genes, encoding respectively a ferritin and a metallothionein, which are known to be involved in homeostasis and detoxification of metals and in response to oxidative stress. Their spatiotemporal expression patterns showed a high accumulation of transcripts restricted to infected cells of nodules in response to drought.

Proteomics of nitrogen fixing nodules under various environmental stresses

Plant Omics, 2012

Proteomics is an ideal tool to study the interaction of root nodules and their symbiotic bacteria as it provides a broad overview of proteins produced by both partners during their constant signal exchange and allows the signal transduction path ways following photophosphorylation. Iron containing proteins play a key role in symbiotic nitrogen fixation that occurs in a nodule-a specialized structure present on roots. Several proteins like those related to SNF (symbiotic nitrogen fixation), predominantly components of nitrogenase complexes, such as nifD, nifH, nifK, nitrogen regulatory protein II (GlnB) and PIIA (PtsN), and urease accessory protein (UreE) have been found to be affected by abiotic stress. Nodules are better equipped with all kinds of antioxidant systems (i.e., ascorbate-glutathione pathway or Superoxide dismutase) which have been formed to show a decline under stress conditions. The present review article aims to investigate the nodule physiology, the effect of different abiotic stress on nodule proteins comprehensive account of these stress-responsive proteins and their role in combating stress in legume nodules. This will help to elucidate which specific key proteins are affected by abiotic stress. As such, it will greatly facilitate understanding resistance or stress tolerance mechanism and hence improvement in crop resistance.

Physiological Responses of Legume Nodules to Drought

Legumes include important agricultural crops, as their high protein content is of primary importance for human food and animal feed. In addition, the ability of most of them to establish symbiotic relationships with soil bacteria allows them to obtain their N requirements from nitrogen fixation in nodules and, therefore, avoids the use of nitrogen fertilizers. Thus, legumes are also essential to improve the soil fertility and quality of agricultural lands and to reclaim eroded or barren areas, making them crucial for agricultural and environmental sustainability. However, legume nitrogen fixation in crop species is very sensitive to environmental constraints and drought, in particular. The present contribution reviews our current knowledge on the processes involved in this inhibition, with particular emphasis on oxygen, nitrogen and carbon physiology. Emerging aspects such as oxidative damage, C/N interactions and sulphur metabolism together with future prospects are also discussed.

A proteomic atlas of the legume Medicago truncatula and its nitrogen-fixing endosymbiont Sinorhizobium meliloti

Nature biotechnology, 2016

Legumes are essential components of agricultural systems because they enrich the soil in nitrogen and require little environmentally deleterious fertilizers. A complex symbiotic association between legumes and nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria called rhizobia culminates in the development of root nodules, where rhizobia fix atmospheric nitrogen and transfer it to their plant host. Here we describe a quantitative proteomic atlas of the model legume Medicago truncatula and its rhizobial symbiont Sinorhizobium meliloti, which includes more than 23,000 proteins, 20,000 phosphorylation sites, and 700 lysine acetylation sites. Our analysis provides insight into mechanisms regulating symbiosis. We identify a calmodulin-binding protein as a key regulator in the host and assign putative roles and targets to host factors (bioactive peptides) that control gene expression in the symbiont. Further mining of this proteomic resource may enable engineering of crops and their microbial partners to incre...

Proteomic insights into intra- and intercellular plant-bacteria symbiotic association during root nodule formation

Frontiers in plant science, 2013

Over the last several decades, there have been a large number of studies done on the all aspects of legumes and bacteria which participate in nitrogen-fixing symbiosis. The analysis of legume-bacteria interaction is not just a matter of numerical complexity in terms of variants of gene products that can arise from a single gene. Bacteria regulate their quorum-sensing genes to enhance their ability to induce conjugation of plasmids and symbiotic islands, and various protein secretion mechanisms; that can stimulate a collection of chain reactions including species-specific combinations of plant-secretion isoflavonoids, complicated calcium signaling pathways and autoregulation of nodulation mechanisms. Quorum-sensing systems are introduced by the intra- and intercellular organization of gene products lead to protein-protein interactions or targeting of proteins to specific cellular structures. In this study, an attempt has been made to review significant contributions related to nodule...

Integrated analysis of zone-specific protein and metabolite profiles within nitrogen-fixing Medicago truncatula-Sinorhizobium medicae nodules

PloS one, 2017

Symbiotic nitrogen fixation (SNF) between rhizobia and legumes requires metabolic coordination within specialized root organs called nodules. Nodules formed in the symbiosis between S. medicae and barrel medic (M. truncatula) are indeterminate, cylindrical, and contain spatially distinct developmental zones. Bacteria in the infection zone II (ZII), interzone II-III (IZ), and nitrogen fixation zone III (ZIII) represent different stages in the metabolic progression from free-living bacteria into nitrogen fixing bacteroids. To better understand the coordination of plant and bacterial metabolism within the nodule, we used liquid and gas chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry (MS) to observe protein and metabolite profiles representative of ZII, IZ, ZIII, whole-nodule, and primary root. Our MS-based approach confidently identified 361 S. medicae proteins and 888 M. truncatula proteins, as well as 160 metabolites from each tissue. The data are consistent with several organ- an...

Carbon Metabolism and Bacteroid Functioning Are Involved in the Regulation of Nitrogen Fixation in Medicago truncatula Under Drought and Recovery

and not yet fully understood. In the present work, the involvement of nodule C and N metabolism in the regulation of SNF in Medicago truncatula under drought and a subsequent rewatering treatment was analyzed using a combination of metabolomic and proteomic approaches. Drought induced a reduction of SNF rates and major changes in the metabolic profile of nodules, mostly an accumulation of amino acids (Pro, His, and Trp) and carbohydrates (sucrose, galactinol, raffinose, and trehalose). This accumulation was coincidental with a decline in the levels of bacteroid proteins involved in SNF and C metabolism, along with a partial reduction of the levels of plant sucrose synthase 1 (SuSy1). In contrast, the variations in enzymes related to N assimilation were found not to correlate with the reduction in SNF, suggesting that these enzymes do not have a role in the regulation of SNF. Unlike the situation in other legumes such as pea and soybean, the drought-induced inhibition of SNF in M. truncatula appears to be caused by impairment of bacteroid metabolism and N 2 -fixing capacity rather than a limitation of respiratory substrate.